


[things creep up on you]

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: [to see you there] [26]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Chloe the vet student, Friendship, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 03:31:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6036220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The point is, though, that even if Clint <i>didn't</i> like Barnes at all, he'd <i>still</i> feel the need to solve the problem that nobody else seems to know how to solve. </p>
<p>(Or, in which Clint solves the problem of getting the kitten fixed.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	[things creep up on you]

Getting Barnes' cat fixed is one of those things that could be simple, if only human beings weren't involved. Because they are, it isn't, and so far there's no way to slice through the Gordian knot without _someone_ getting cut. 

The problem is, the usual way these things go - you drop the cat off at whatever Surgery Drop-off Time is, the actual operation gets done middle of the day, cat stays tucked away back in the clinic or vet hospital or whatever until sometime in the early evening and then gets to go home - is not an option. Clearly. Self-evidently. Barnes is going to have enough trouble physically letting the cat get taken from him, put under anaesthetic and cut up; padding that with a few hours on either side is _asking_ for trouble. 

On the other hand, Clint lived around cats that weren't fixed when he was a kid, and there's no way in hell Barnes could handle the thing going into heat on a regular basis, or the chance she'd get out and he'd end up with another litter of kittens. Between Steve, the kid from the building, the actual kitten and whoever wanders by looking particularly pathetic at the time but is mostly someone else's problem, the looking-after-people thing seems to be securely where it's helping - but it'd be damn easy to overwhelm the guy. So getting the kitten fixed is not an optional thing. 

Now, that's the kind of problem you'd expect having easy access to basically Stark Everything would solve pretty quickly. 

And if it were, say, _Tasha_ (or himself, Clint acknowledges, or even, like, Tony himself, or Wilson, or _whoever_ \- actually pretty much _anyone else_ ) it would. You grab some well-rated vet who's smart enough to say yes to a crapload of house-call money, stick the stuff they need into the Tower's "infirmary" (aka Tony's private hospital), do the whole post-surgery observation period somewhere in a nice office with a TV so as to avoid that whole Problem With Medical Anything, done and dusted, have a nice day. If it were anyone else, there you go, all sorted out.

It's not. It's Barnes. 

Which means while option one is a shoe-in for a psychotic episode, option _two_ is a guaranteed pit of self-loathing and inwardly directed contempt. 

And it's not that the guy won't _do_ it. Clint's pretty sure everyone's leaning on option two as the best of a bad job except for Barnes. And he's pretty sure _Barnes_ basically hit _I will put up with whatever Steve decides up to and including cutting my remaining fingers off or shooting me in the head_ about two sentences into the very first conversation about it. 

Clint didn't see that conversation, since he can guarantee it happened in private at their condo, and he's _still_ willing to bet hard money on that one. The guy was definitely 100% there by the time it was ever broached around anyone else. 

(That was Stark. And Clint doesn't even blame the guy: it's a reasonable question. It's even possible nobody else beyond Clint and Tasha _noticed_ the complete and total shutdown across the room, but Tasha notices everything, and Clint's pretty familiar with that brand of shutdown, so he noticed.) 

And Clint could say he's not sure why he decided he personally should find the solution to the tangle, or even why he's so sure he _can_ find the solution, but that's a lie: his subconscious decided for him because he has a categorical moral objection to people having to live out of that kind of mental place, ever, period, and it just gets louder if he's even vaguely _acquainted_ with them. He doesn't even have to like them.

Hell he'd have a moral objection to _Jasper Sitwell_ living from that fucking place. Or Brock Rumlow. And that's saying something. 

Of course as he thinks that, like it's some kind of internal test, his brain tries to bring up Alexander Pierce. Dragging the whole thing off course a bit. 

He mostly tries not to think about Alexander Pierce: the fact is, he doesn't have _room_ for how much he hates that guy. Sitwell, Rumlow-in-retrospect, there's lots of people Clint can quite comfortably hate and yet still sort of . . . cope with, encompass. They might be evil, and they might be absolute pieces of shit, but their evil is on a kind of human level, a personal level. 

Pierce's isn't. With Pierce it's more like trying to have a personal experience, real life opinion and reaction to Josef Stalin. To someone who got to fucking set the course of the world, who - whether they deserved it or not - managed to be bigger than life and do it for _years_. For a fucking lifetime. Changing generations. It's the kind of evil that apparently's been fucking shaping the whole world for decades and making it worse, and not even because of something _vast_ , something from the human mob - no, instead it's shit coming from the obsessions and drives of one man. It makes it disproportionate. It makes it beyond Clint's ability to really deal with.

He's not just evil: he's made other people evil, made whole _systems_ evil, increased the overall evil of humankind exponentially because of shit he, personally, believed. He had every opportunity to be something else and instead he did _that_. Instead of being caught in systems, he fucking _made_ the systems, deliberately, personally: made the systems for other people to get caught in and fucked over, fucked up. Marred. 

Arnim Zola couldn't've done that; Zola never had the charisma. He was small and obsessive and evil but it was a personal evil. Parasitic. Depending on someone else giving him the space and the power. HYDRA under Arnim Zola would've stayed the desperate little pocket of rot it was all the way through the late forties and early fifties - a problem, sure, a little knot of corruption and poison screwing up anyone else's attempts to make the world better, but not what it became. 

Not what tainted and shook the whole damn world. 

There are probably other people who could absolutely encompass enough hatred for Alexander Pierce from that, but Clint's not one of them: if he thinks too hard about it the way the bastard bled bad shit into the world and turned the bleed into a web and caught people in it, it gets overwhelming. Which is probably why, as he's thinking through how he wouldn't want his worst enemies caught in a certain kind of fucked up place, his subconscious tries to make him think about the guy. 

But Clint's got an answer for that one. And that answer is, should it ever have been a question, that it'd be a moot point. Because he'd have a fervent moral objection to Pierce surviving, living, _consuming oxygen_ , period, end of story, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars, _finite_ , Barton out, amen. So he'd just solve the problem by the traditional "two to the chest, one to the face" technique.

Then douse the corpse with gasoline and light it on fire, possibly pissing in the ashes when they go out on their own. 

See? All sorted. He's good. 

The point is, though, that even if Clint _didn't_ like Barnes at all, he'd _still_ feel the need to solve the problem that nobody else seems to know how to solve. 

Hell, it occurs to him that maybe they _can't_. Steve's never had a pet before and everyone else kinda lives in psychological worlds where "so then I had this special opportunity (which I could never hope to repay) to solve the whole problem because my friend has a lot of money" _isn't_ a massive smack in the face to any sense of independent competence. 

Clint's deliberately taken a weed whacker to that kind of thing in his own head: it's just not useful, especially not in his kind of life. But he knows where it comes from, and he _had_ to take that weed whacker to it, and honestly as far as that shit goes . . . .

Barnes is probably just about as dependent on other people as he's literally capable of standing without drowning himself in the first available body of water, so yeah, this is just another bucket in the tank. Here: have another debt you can't repay. That's not what it is, but that shit's hard to undo. And Rogers, he's sort of halfway there: he's got some of the same stuff, but he's also got places where it just doesn't apply, because he can't connect them to his life before the weight of the world was at least potentially on his shoulders. He's still cranky at Stark for the condo-buffer and the washing machines, but he's got no problem with the Tower floor or flying lessons or combat tech. Because only the first part's part of life as _Steve Rogers_ , individual person with a life; the other part's all up and around _Captain America_ , where the exchange-rate is the part where he's probably going to get killed saving someone else's life, and that's a fair trade for pretty much anything. 

It's a pretty mature and functional kind of split, honestly. But Steve's got a mostly healthy brain and psyche to make it with. Barnes still lives firmly in the box that Clint labels "I'm really fucking impressed you haven't committed mass homicide yet." (It's a long label.) And it'd be a pretty stupid failure of conditioning _not_ to lean hard on _you owe us for everything we've ever given you_ , and Clint doesn't think HYDRA or Pierce was that stupid. So take your natural inclination, take all the cope someone's got and make it already gone because of all the other shit, and then hand them a massive psychological weight of debt on top of the topiary bushes the bastards made out of his brain. 

So nobody else is gonna figure it out, so clearly it's Clint's job. 

Clint also recognizes that this kind of thought process is why there was a note - handwritten, in Coulson's handwriting - about not being cleared for missions that were likely to end with him adopting at-risk youth, from any continent. But he's at peace with that, and besides that prohibition never stuck. 

Anyway, he only adopted a half-dozen over all his years with SHIELD. And they were all net gains in the end. And besides, "adopted" is a bit strong. Well, other than Nat. Other than Nat, he'd just sort of . . .taken an interest. 

He can see Phil Coulson, in his head, giving him the blank look that meant _I'm just waiting for you to stop talking so I can stare at you some more and make sure that everything I want that stare to communicate that I'm not going to say out loud is getting across._

He misses Coulson. Although at least the man hadn't had to live to find out about HYDRA. That would have hurt him. A lot. 

The point being, in the end, that it's pretty much inevitable that Clint would decide to solve this problem. It's the kind of thing he does. 

That just leaves him with the question of how, and how to bring it up. 

He considers it for a while, over a chess game with an old Korean guy in a park. He's good, and because Clint's mostly thinking about the other problem the old man gets very close to winning, and seems to be having fun instead of just mechanically moving the pieces around until his partner of the moment either resigns or gives up and leaves. So all in all, it's a win for everyone, even if Clint does eventually deliberately stalemate, shake the old man's hand and wander away. 

After a couple moments of idle strolling, he decides to hit up a cafe and get some kind of tea latte or something else he can fool the psychological addiction into thinking is coffee. The closest one turns out to be an independent very big into being an Idiosyncratic Local Place, right down to mismatched for-here mugs, and he gets something with raspberry black tea and chocolate syrup that the girl behind the counter swears is great. Then he sits down with his idiosyncratic mug and the sudoku puzzle from today's paper and absently fills in numbers while he keeps thinking. 

In general, when it comes to people - especially messed up people - there are worse ideas than following Tasha's lead. So all in all, in terms of "how to bring it up", Clint's going with "present the total fait accompli, whatever it is, and be comfortable with a self-protective performance of bad grace." And really, if Clint made a habit of being hurt when people have to resort to self-protective performances of bad grace, firstly he'd have no friends, and secondly he'd be a hypocrite. He does try not to be a hypocrite. 

That just leaves the question of what the hell to actually do about it. 

 

Money isn't the answer. Money, and the things money does. 

It makes this a bit of an unusual situation. The sad fact is, money - enough money - can solve a whole lot of things. But it happens. And right now money's not the answer because it isn't _Barnes'_ money, at least not in any way Barnes can grasp or accept, and that's hitting all kinds of buttons. 

Stark would _like_ money to be the answer, but that's because when it comes to Barnes he's got a streak of guilt about a mile wide. Clint's not even sure all of it has to do with James Barnes qua James Barnes - some of it does, is Tony Stark taking ownership of Howard Stark's inability to magically read minds and figure out what nobody including some of the most intelligent and ridiculously paranoid people Clint's ever met (and that's a high bar) ever did, because Tony's daddy issues are deep, nuanced, complicated, and full of fascinating chiaroscuro. 

But Clint thinks some of it has nothing to do with that, and he hasn't figured it out yet. Kind of thinks Tony hasn't either. 

Around about this point Clint gets distracted for a bit, remembering how it used to be SHIELD colleagues he did this kind of figuring-out on. Then gets mired in what he can only call a melancholy for a while, thinking about how many of them are dead. 

Too many. Most of them on Insight, or after, while he waited to see if Nat was going to be one of them. There wasn't anything he could really _do_ about it; if he'd been stuck on his own he'd've spent another year at least just . . . being as invisible as he could, and trying to figure out where his enemies _were_ , and trying to stay alive. On his own he had the resources to do _that_ , but not to protect much of anyone else. With Nat he could, and did, do something for some of the ones that were left, but before she did show up, by himself . . .he could keep himself safe, but that's about it. He hates that. 

So the only thing he could do was pay attention to the obituaries and drop money in whatever fund or charity they said to donate to in lieu of flowers. Trust funds for kids. That kind of thing. 

Clint shakes that off by going to watch the UFC match that night at a bar chosen more or less at random. He makes a couple new friends, of the temporary kind, and takes advantage of some of the post-fight conversation about families and work to drop in some parenting advice to one of the guys and some marriage advice to one of the others, and gives them a fake number generated by one of the apps he's got in his phone. It's one that's mostly used by women to avoid giving assholes their real number while still managing to avoid having said asshole blow up in their faces. Assuming any of them do care to try to keep in touch Clint'll probably do more or less the same thing women do and let shit trail off, though he's not sure about the struggling dad. Him, Clint might keep answering for a bit. 

It is tough, when you're raised to be a certain kind of guy and now what you thought was your pre-teen son's just started trying to explain she's actually your pre-teen daughter, and the guy is trying - and to give credit where credit's due his buddies are helping best they can. 

But that best isn't great, because they're the same kind of guy he is and mostly what they've got is good intentions, and his family - his family isn't helping at all. Since it's not like there's a current on-going crisis in Clint's life, he figures he can spare some hours worth of effort passing along support, if the guy needs it. Point him at resources. Make for one less kid fucked up by adults sticking their heads up their asses, maybe. 

And Clint's thinking about this guy, and thinking about ordinary people, when he realizes the solution to the getting-the-damn-kitten-fixed problem is actually right in front of them, except that nobody else'll think about it because to most of the lot of them ordinary isn't ordinary, ordinary's the foreign country. Hell, even Betty Ross's childhood was weird and cramped and fucked up and full of her dad's alcoholism and anger issues, and definitely no room for pets. At least not ones that lived very long, and boy is that going on the list of questions Clint's never going to ask the lady. 

With that figured out, Clint goes home, which these days is back to the Tower. He falls asleep sprawled on his back on the bed, although he sort of forgets to change out of his clothes. When he wakes up in the morning Natasha's curled up beside him, wrapped in one of the plush blankets from the living-room, fast asleep. 

 

"Nope," Natasha says, sitting at the breakfast bar blearily drinking coffee from an oversized mug she holds in both hands, while Clint makes omelettes and lays out the process of _how_ he figured it out. "Still missing it." 

"Yeah, well," Clint replies, "you went drinking with _Thor_ last night, Tasha, I'm amazed you're not still drunk." It's almost nine, well past the point either of them's usually up - mostly because after Clint showered Tasha had parboiled herself in the bathtub for almost an hour waiting for the ibuprofen, vitamins and warmed-up broth from Clint's freezer to help her decide whether or not she planned to be dead for the rest of the day. 

Tasha acknowledges that by raising her coffee mug a fraction. "You should go out with him one night, though," she adds, "and no I'm not just trying to get you this hungover - he is _eerily_ good at getting along with people, and he's not even doing it by craft. It's really fucking neat to watch. And nice." She takes another sip of coffee and winces. "But I am pretty hung-over, and sticking with being grateful it's not messing with my stomach." 

One of the nice things money _can_ provide to the world, and one that Clint enjoys, is having someone else perfectly season cast-iron frying pans so he can just use the damn things; as he waits for this one to finish heating up, he says, "The point is, ordinary people rely on the good-will of other ordinary people when they need something out of the ordinary. They ask. Figure out if the normal way things go can be changed, rules bent, that kind of shit." 

"Okay," Natasha says, frowning, "but you're still not going to find a half-decent vet who's willing to let a kitten skip observation coming off of anaesthetic - " 

"But," Clint says, flipping the butter into the pan and moving it around to coat, "you might find one who's willing to let, I dunno, a vet with severe PTSD sit in his office or something with the kitten and read a book until the kitten's ready to go home, narrowing down the time the cat's out of Barnes' sight to just the time it actually takes to cut her open and clean stuff out and sew her up again." 

"Really not great phrasing for a hangover while you're cooking breakfast, Barton," Natasha says with annoyance that's not even convincingly feigned, but a slightly queasy grimace that's pretty convincing. She's frowning with her eyes closed, and eventually puts down her mug. "I'm trying to find the reason why that won't work," she says. "I mean - " 

"There's the usual bunch of little shit that could sink it," Clint says. "You and I both know that's true of anything, though. Which is why I pretty much plan on presenting it as a tied up plan - but there's nothing built in that says it won't work, and if it does it'll suck less than any of the other options, so I might as well check it up." 

"It is stupidly obvious in retrospect," Tasha says, halfway between rueful and contemplative. She rubs her temples for a minute and then combs her hair back from her face with both hands and picks up her mug again. "Start with the vet student who lives on the ground floor in their building," she suggests, as Clint pours the egg into the pan. "Her English name's Chloe. She's a receptionist at a clinic, and she's how James was getting the eye-drops back when the fuzzy little thing still needed them. And," Nat adds, "the girl's been living there the whole time Steve has, so I _know_ James's already broken in and thoroughly vetted every part of her life he can get at to establish she's basically safe." 

Probably meant that, among other things, he'd shadowed her to work at least once or twice, and probably shadowed her boss or bosses to _their_ homes, which means Barnes's paranoia is probably at least vaguely comfortable with the idea that no one involved in the clinic is actively HYDRA or actively hunting him. Which is probably a head-start that other people wouldn't get. 

Clint doesn't blame the guy for the paranoia. 

"Which condo?" he asks. 

 

The vet student and her girlfriend are absurdly cute. The vet student's situational awareness is also terrible. Clint has had an easier time following someone, but not often. 

The day he follows her, he breaks off when she goes into the clinic itself, and goes to get himself a coffee from the nearest independent cafe. 

He's toned down complaining about corporate coffee in general: to start with, it was mostly a game anyway, because he likes watching people's faces as they try and fit things they didn't expect him to have Opinions on in their mental picture of him; and to follow up, while Starbucks is still basically the morning glory of the coffee world, it's also apparently working just fine as a touchstone-for-the-outside-world for Barnes, and Clint tries not to get in the habit of mocking the coping mechanisms of people he has to spend any amount of time around. It's a dick move, and also leads to a lot of conflict. 

But just because he's not bitching about corporate coffee anymore doesn't mean he wants to drink it. 

After teaching the inadequately trained teenager behind the counter how to get a decent espresso shot from her machine, he gets a decaf americano, puts almond milk and honey in it, and strolls back over to the clinic. 

As far as first impressions go, it looks promising. It's not run-down by any means, but the building's a bit older, and the front, sign and waiting-room look more like they're trying to convince clients that this clinic loves their precious little furbabies, rather than convincing them that only people in brand-name clothing will ever be in the other chairs. The floor's a newish laminate and extremely clean, the walls are covered with helpful educational posters asking you things like whether or not you brush your cat's teeth or take good enough care of your dog's paws, the prescription food's all in shelves that look like they're from Walmart over in the corner, and there's a lazy vet-office cat wandering around making the receptionist's life difficult. 

There's a couch and a couple of chairs, black faux-leather of the kind that you can easily wipe clean and disinfect, a few other canvas folding chairs along the wall, and a well-loved cat-tree in the corner. Clint sits down on one end of the couch; there's also a few other people in the waiting room, but they've all sort of fanned out in the loose line that means "we all know who goes after who, but this way we get to sit down." 

All but one of them have carriers, because it's surgery-drop-off time. Appropriately. 

It's someone else when Clint comes in, but the receptionist rapidly becomes the vet student, Chloe, and the other woman (older, with plainer scrubs, probably an actual technician) disappears into the surgery and the rest of the back-end of the clinic. Over Chloe's shoulder, Clint can see a bit of that, and it mirrors the rest of the place: the equipment's good, everything's scrupulously clean, but nobody really cares that the veneer on the very side of the counter is starting to chip off. 

The kind of thing that says that the clinic focuses on patient care over appearance, but also that it's probably working with circumstances like clients paying by instalment, or slowly, and sometimes things just don't get charged for. As he listens to the people in the line talk to Chloe, the assessment gets some support: the one who doesn't have a carrier is here to get meds for her dog, and Chloe gives her samples of one and expresses her regret that they have to charge for the other. 

He can work with that. 

And actually, the setup's workable without even having to change much. As he watches, Clint discovers the two doors he assumed were respectively a closet and the door to the office are actually doors to very small rooms set up like little sitting rooms, with another set of cheap chairs and couches and a little coffee-table, but with a glass top and a small cabinet that's probably got basic exam stuff in it. So two of the exam rooms, at least, don't look that much like exam rooms. 

Makes sense, Clint considers. Probably get cats and dogs, at least, a lot less agitated going into what looks like a little strange living-room, than going into rooms that have a cold counter, one step away from a surgery table. Probably has just about the same effect on the owners. And for basic exams, which amount to the vet squishing the animal with their hands all over to make sure nothing feels weird, looking at their teeth, sticking a stethoscope on them for a bit, listening to the humans talk and maybe sticking a couple shots in, that's probably all you need. 

The third's a little more medical looking, if short of a surgery, and when that door opens Clint can see a vet tech in scrubs taking off nitrile gloves while a small dog whines. 

There's a small sign on the wall that says "your vet today is: Dr Burger", with the name of the vet being on a little plastic sign that can slide out of the bigger sign. Clint has sincere compassion for whatever kid got stuck growing up with that last name. Or kids. But more importantly, it means there's more than one vet. 

Eventually all the animals get signed in and it's Clint's turn. Nobody's come in behind him, but he's not surprised: other than for surgery drop-off, seven am on a workday morning's not a really friendly time for most people. 

Chloe has excellent Cheerful Friendly Customer Service skills and - Clint observed while he was waiting - a tendency to talk in run-on sentences that really, really like to run on. The Cheerful and Friendly she turns on him has only a little touch of the blankness that means _I have no idea who you are, or what you want._

They acknowledge each other as human beings, and then Clint leans an arm on the high counter and says, "I actually came by because I need to have a word with the vet, and it's a little involved - there any time today he or she could give me twenty minutes or so?" 

"Ummmm," the girl named Chloe says, pulling up something on the flatscreen monitor and squinting at it; she needs new glasses, Clint notes. "Possibly later this morning?" she says, chewing on her cheek. "We're a bit busy today - I mean I know it doesn't _look_ like we're busy out here but trust me, we're busy - so it's hard to say for sure. Are you going to be around the area . . . ?" 

"Unless it'd bug you, I can actually hang out here for a bit," Clint replies. "I'd just go to a cafe and read, and since I've already got the coffee - " he lifts up his cup and she blinks. 

"Sure," she says, "I mean, if you're fine with that. I'll try to find out for you as soon as I can." 

"Not to worry," Clint says, sitting back down and pulling up the Kindle app on his phone. 

About a half hour later, Receptionist Chloe comes back to say that Dr Burger is booked pretty much solid, but that Dr Santiago's coming in around ten to do paperwork and says she can talk to him then. Clint thanks her and, in order to avoid being That Creepy Guy, goes to find somewhere to have second breakfast. On his way back, it occurs to him to check where the nearest Starbucks _is_ : like any good invasive it doesn't fail him, and there's one just around the corner. 

Dr Santiago turns out to be a short-ish Puerto Rican woman with long, straight dark hair and an air of brisk efficiency so focused that Clint's actually impressed, which takes a lot. She's also a polite hostess and offers him coffee and, when he demurs based on caffeine, offers him a berry herbal tea instead. She offers him a seat in a somewhat battered chair that Clint thinks mostly does duty as an extra side-table. 

Then she sits down at the desk (it's not just hers, because Clint can see all the signs of a desk-space uneasily shared between at least one extremely organized and one laissez-faire person), folds her hands in front of her palms down, looks at him in an efficiently attentive way, and says, "So! Chloe tells me you wanted to discuss something." 

 

The trick to getting people to do what you want is to find the reason they want to do it, too. The more natural and subtle the reason, the better, because the more natural and subtle the reason the more everyone's getting something they want out of the whole deal, and that's basically your best case scenario. Most of the time, you don't have to lie and you don't have to threaten: you just find that reason they want what you want, and make it happen. 

Basic people skills, really. 

Sometimes that means money, because money's that all-embracing marker that you can trade in for other stuff you want, but not as often as you'd think. And with Dr Santiago, Clint can just about _hear_ her brain clicking into a whole different gear when he puts the word _veteran_ together with the words _emotional support animal_. So he reorients his whole direction around that click. 

It's not like it's even a lie, after all. 

By the end of the conversation he's betting on one of "brother", "father" or "boyfriend" as the veteran in her life, and either six months or so of _severe_ difficulty, coming out of their tours, or a life-time of unpredictable but milder moments of tripping and falling flat on his face, maybe with addiction. On an outside chance, Clint'll go with "best friend" and at the _very_ outside he'll go with a really, really repressed woman in one of those available slots, but if he were actually putting money on this, it'd be one of those first three. 

Mostly, Clint gently steers her through details, but she's the one who offers up the idea _come in on Sunday_ \- when the clinic's usually closed but still doing procedures, which means it wouldn't make for needing to cancel or avoid any new normal appointments, and there'd be fewer people around in general, which - all things considered - Clint figures is a good idea. Clint picks next Sunday - also known as four days from now - when she offers it up, on the basis that the less time Barnes has to ruminate on the whole thing, in _this_ particular case, the better. Four days is a reasonable stretch of time to just avoid thinking about something by sheer force of will; longer, that starts getting harder. 

Sometimes having time means you ease into stuff; sometimes it just means you work yourself up more. Clint's pretty good at guessing which of the two something's going to be. 

He shakes Dr Santiago's hand, takes the appointment card, and wanders out the front door. Outside, as he walks, he texts Tasha with, _and that'll work fine. want to tell rogers?_

What he gets back is an almost immediate _you tell steve_ , and it makes him frown a bit at the phone screen for a full ten seconds. 

It's long enough to decide that right now he doesn't really _want_ Tasha to lay out her reasons, because the chances of them meaning he can't avoid doing some introspection that isn't going to be entirely comfortable - for any of a thousand reasons - are pretty high, but the introspection isn't a matter of life and death, or she'd be pushing harder. Instead he just asks, _that a good idea?_

Clint has a pretty clear mental image of how _she's_ looking at her phone when she retorts, _do I ever tell you to do things that AREN'T?_

There have to be one or two. But they're not leaping right to mind, so Clint concedes the point by not coming up with a retort of his own, and instead pulls up Rogers' entry in his contacts and hits his number. It takes a couple rings before Clint gets a "Hello?" that almost sounds sleepy, which is unusual for a guy who's normally up at the crack of dawn even if he doesn't have to be (because clearly his brain damage is just subtler and more directed than his best friend's), but Clint elects not to comment. 

"So I may have unilaterally solved the getting-the-cat-fixed problem," is what he says instead, and only notices after he's said it how the general article replaced the possessive. 

Damn it, Tasha. 

 

Overall, when it comes down to it, Clint prefers to live on top of his feelings. 

It's different from repressing or ignoring them, or just being ignorant about what they are. He did all that, once upon a time, but with the life he decided to live those are coping strategies with a pretty short shelf-life, and their failure mode tends to be explosive. Somewhere along the line, almost certainly somewhere where someone was trying to kill him and he was trying pretty hard not to get killed, he'd accidentally figured out the coping mechanism that more or less works, which is what he thinks of as _living on top of them_. 

As metaphors go, it's easiest to explain with the idea of an ocean : all kinds of different depths, the surface not necessarily reflecting that, but the surface also battering you one way or another depending on the storm, and so on. Which is funny because Clint kind of hates the ocean. Or at least being on the ocean. It's worse than being in the backseat of a moving automobile and definitely worse than being in a plane, even if he's not the one flying it. 

The point is, as long as you stay on top, you can still stay in touch with it all _while_ you handle whatever the fuck is going on underneath you and adapt to it and figure out what to do about it. It's when you get knocked down under the surface that you get fucked up. 

That happens, sometimes. Sometimes no coping mechanism works. Sometimes there's nothing you can do. The year after Loki fucked with his head and then killed people (including one specific person) that Clint was kind of attached to on his way out - sometimes using Clint to do it - he'd spent most of his time drowning, or trying not to. If you push the metaphor a bit further really he kept from actually drowning because of Tasha repeatedly pulling him out. Sometimes by the hair. 

(He'd kinda deserved it, though.) 

These days, he's more or less back where he wants to be. Insight, SHIELD's destruction, all of it more or less proved that. Clint could have done with a less _comprehensive_ fucking test, thanks, but his reconstructed psyche managed to pass. 

But even if you can do it, the thing that'll catch you off-guard sometimes is just how deep what you're floating on got while you weren't looking. 

 

When he gets back to the Tower he heads to her floor, and makes a sort of gesture at dropping the waxed paper bag of expensive gummy bears he picked up for her on her head as a wordless comment. It's a gesture, because he knows she'll catch it and she does, but still. 

"I didn't say _anything_ ," she replies, immediately digging into the candy. 

"If I had a rubber band, I'd shoot it at your head," he tells her, "but I can't remember where you keep them." 

That's a lie (they're in the top drawer of the white-and-pearl end table beside the door that leads to the hallway that leads to her bedroom and the more or less hidden ballet studio space on the right), and she knows it's a lie, but they leave it for plausible deniability and he goes to find a beer. 

Most people, he figures, would find Natasha's floor kind of unexpected. If you asked someone what they _would_ expect someone like Tasha to go with when it comes to home decor, most of them wouldn't really know (and the smartest of them would realize how well that illustrates how little they know her), but the guesses would mostly range from sleekly European to something more like how Clint likes his, open plan and loft aesthetic, dark woods and that kind of crap. They'd be wrong. 

Although it'll never stop cracking him up that at this point in his life he has any kind of decorating aesthetic. His twenty-year-old self would insist that means he's actually a pod-person, but that's mostly because his twenty-year-old self was an idiot. In so many ways. 

Clint thinks his floor came as a kind of relief to the designer stuck with actually sorting out the living-spaces for Tony's "be friends with me!" project: he could point at pictures - and not even that many of them - and go "see that? like that." Clint has never felt the slightest need to make some kind of personality statement with his living-space and he's not that picky. He can claim just about any space and the most he cares about is that the colours and the basic shape are the kind that let his mind go _quiet_ instead of wind back up, even on a bad day. Other than that, the things he is particular about he brings in himself. 

Considering Clint knows Tony'd had the penthouse redone, Bruce and Betty were being a classic married couple about wrangling out details of their decor, and then there was Nat, he's pretty comfortable saying he didn't imagine the grateful look on the designer's face. 

Not that Nat had been difficult in the sense of impolite, or even unreasonable. It's just that when it comes down to it, the floor at the Tower was the first time she's ever had to design a space for herself, exactly the way she wants it, without having to worry about anything _but_ what she wants. 

She's had apartments and townhouses, but all of them needed to blend, to some degree. Not to stand out. Not make people remember her as "oh yeah, she was the one with _that_ living-room," or think to tell stories about her to their colleagues, or whatever. Anonymous. And to be something she could abandon without too much worry. And those were just the ones that were normal, instead of a part of some persona that needed living-space matched to story. In the normal ones there was always something, some part of the bedroom or den or basement, that Clint could recognize as a designated refuge, but all still stealth, all still undercover. Someone else might come in, and figure something out. Even some idiot going for a B &E. 

But with this, the only person she'd even _potentially_ need to put a show on for is Tony Stark, and it's a fundamental tenet of their relationship that he'll pretend he doesn't understand her at all, even to himself, and she'll do whatever the hell she wants. Nobody else _can_ get in. Physically. Except Clint, but he doesn't count. Theoretically even Tony can't, and with Stark, Nat's in the same place as Clint is: there comes a point where you just decide you're going to trust someone (or at least trust your reading of them) and let the chips fall where they may, because anything else just gets stupid. 

So Tasha'd happily obsessed in whatever leisure time she'd had around then, and been politely finicky about every last detail, right down to the crown moulding. 

It'd be misleading to say she indulged her inner fourteen year old, but only because that'd make most people picture exactly the wrong thing, because he's pretty sure most people's inner fourteen year old didn't fall overwhelmingly in love with the kind of expensive Victorian museum-piece decorated in shades of unforgiving white that jerks with too much money and too much family history inflicted on their daughters in expensive houses in Europe when Tasha's inner fourteen year old was outer. Tasha's inner fourteen year old's always been kind of special and at some point it imprinted on that image, hard: white lacquer and gold leaf, slender limbs on furniture, the kind of place where the difference between ecru and eggshell really does matter, all of it. 

Considering how much shit Tasha's inner fourteen year old has had kicked out of her over the years, Clint kind of loves the whole place. There are lots of different rooms, and each one has a specific purpose: bedroom, dressing-room, private bathroom, bathroom for visitors to use assuming she ever let anyone in here, study, library, sitting-room, dining-room, breakfast-nook . . .everything has its own space, and most of them have doors and you'd never imagine except for the windows that the whole thing was in a hyper-modern steel-and-glass tower instead of a carefully maintained nineteenth-century house. 

"You should get a fluffy white cat," he says, coming to sit down in the sitting-room, where she's curled up on the couch, now eating gummies. "Or a fluffy white dog." 

Tasha gives him a Look. "If you want a dog, _you_ get a dog," she retorts. "Pets are like kids. I borrow other people's. I don't have one." 

Part of the finicky process of the whole floor had been finding furniture that _looked_ like the kind she wanted - the kind where there's a trim of wood in kind of fanciful shapes around the upholstery on the chairs and couches - that was actually comfortable. But she'd managed it, or some miracle-worker Stark had hired had managed it, and if Clint knows he looks wildly out of place on her furniture, he's okay with that, and he's comfortable. 

He didn't bother to get a glass for his beer; he takes a drink and then points the mouth of the bottle at her. "This is your fault," he says, and he means Barnes, and Rogers, and the fact that he just negotiated this entire veterinary procedure and most of all the part where "your problem" had become "the problem", with its hidden little implication that fundamentally, it's his problem too. 

"Gosh," she replies, turning the page of her magazine and picking through the gummy-bears for the red ones, because there's an order she eats the things in, "you mean you might form a human connection that actually knows who you are and what your real phone-number is? I'm not sure I can live with that. I'm so very sorry." She turns the page again and adds, "Besides, it's at least partly Stark's fault for being overinvested and desperately needy in the first place." 

"Yeah, right," Clint says, leaning back in the chair and putting his feet on the ottoman. "I think I could've ducked him, Nat." 

He adds, "You know _you're_ the one who's gonna have to convince Steve he should stay home," and gets the mild gratification of schadenfreude as she looks up, blinks, and then forgets what expression comes next as she realizes he's right and she's got no argument. "Ah-hah," he says, pointing the bottle at her again. 

Putting her face in her hands is a touch theatrical, but it's a deliberate theatricality. 

"Damn it," she says, with a sigh. 

 

Steve's response to start with is non-committal, but Clint expected that. Back o-these-many-months-now Natasha'd been worried he wouldn't listen to her warnings about what kind of power he had over his friend, will he nil he, but the guy had definitely thrown himself at rising to the occasion and does a pretty good job as far as Clint can tell. And his opinion is about as educated about this particular little island of Human Shit as you can get. 

So now Steve balances as best anyone can on the tightrope of filtering the world as best as possible, without rolling over Barnes' fragile free will, even with the best of intentions. So to start with, anything that means that Barnes should be or even could be making a decision about is gonna get you non-committal from Steve. He's probably trying not to _have_ an opinion on it until Barnes' at least _voiced_ his. 

On top of that, Clint figures it's going to take at least six or seven hours of retroengineering the whole thought process before Steve figures out _why_ this is probably going to make Barnes feel less like shit, even though it seems like it should be riskier than the other options. Steve's had an easier time adjusting to the admittedly pretty alien world they all live in, when it comes to resources and who has it and where it comes form and why.

After all, he's not trying to rebuild a whole damn self with really broken pieces and no matching replacements. That makes a difference. But it means on the whole scale of factors Steve's gonna start out by weighting that one, the worry about where you get your stuff from, too low. So Clint takes the non-committal as granted and figures he'll hear back for real later. 

He stays on Tasha's floor for dinner after she gives him a whole lecture in fifteen seconds of solidly maintained Look when he admits he skipped lunch, and is her usual kindly tolerant self about him continually throwing a fist-sized rubber ball in an endless rotation of wall-floor-hand-wall-floor-hand that counts as his version of fidgeting. 

Tasha's reinstated Recreational Cooking Night with Maria, which is good. It's definitely nice to see one less chunk of her head getting perpetually ripped out by missing someone. It's not like she ever let that many people get rooted enough to miss them. Right now Maria seems to be going through an intense Personal Italian Renaissance, which probably accounts for why Natasha's going to the effort of making kaeng pa for the two of them tonight: makes for contrast. 

Clint sits on one of the breakfast-nook chairs turned backwards, resting his elbows on the back and eventually reversing the bounce to floor-wall-hand for some variety. 

When she looks up from cutting the pork Tasha gets an amused look on her face, and he sighs and asks, "What?" 

Not that he can't think of a dozen things she might be amused by right now, but that's the point: there's about a dozen of them, and even-odds _which_ she finds so damn funny. 

"You've got your _fuck-why-is-everyone-around-me-so-young_ look," she informs him, pouring some oil into her pan to brown the meat. 

" . . . yeah, well, you all _are_ ," he retorts, and she gives him her grin-without-grinning, where her eyes get bright but her teeth don't show. 

"It's not quite as tragic as Stark's, as looks go," she says, as Clint drags a hand over his face. He snorts at that. 

"Considering how often he acts like a fucking seventeen year old," he says, "I don't think he gets to have that look." 

Tasha washes her hands and then pulls out another beer and tosses it to him, and then throws him the bottle-opener afterwards. "Besides," Clint says. "Steve Rogers _is_ young. Even when he's old, he's young." 

"Mmn," Nat replies, and it's more or less agreement; she sighs. "And James Barnes isn't, even when he should be." 

Clint pops the cap off the beer and tosses her the bottle-opener back; she's pulled out a Mike's Hard Lemonade, which means _she's_ been yanking some bits around in her head today, even if they haven't been dramatic. "You'd know better than me," he says, as she catches the bottle-opener. "Guy's got a pretty damn good wall when other people are around, so I've only got what you pass on." He pauses, and adds, "And a couple hours without the wall, but I was kinda hungover and concussed at the time." 

"What did you see?" she asks, starting to actually throw the various ingredients together into one pot. "I never asked, I got too distracted being pissed off." 

Clint shrugs, takes a minute to think back and see if there's anything he did see he's not thinking about, and then shakes his head, leaning comfortably on the back of the chair with his forearms across the top. 

"He avoids eye-contact," he says, "he likes to have solid things between him and other people if he can get it and distance if he can't, he's got a _serious_ habit of looking after people even when he'd rather they were on the other side of the moon, plus some seriously ingrained hospitality norms, and given how little of it there was right _then_ I'd bet good money when they're alone he and Steve basically don't bother with personal space," Clint replies, letting the bottle dangle from his fingers. He gives up on the ball for now, letting it drop between him and the back of the chair. "And that's about as much as I got before Steve got out of the shower and got to be the thing people pay attention to so he could leave. Although I was pretty impressed at how Steve managed to make physically putting himself between us look casual." 

Natasha looks thoughtful, her head slightly to one side. Eventually she says, "Not _bad_ , for concussed and hungover," like she's granting a big favour. 

"Thanks," he retorts, dryly. She turns the heat on the stove down to simmer, and leans on the island's countertop with both forearms folded flat in front of her. 

"Well at least you're not getting dim in your old age," she says, mock-sweetly, and then gets her not-grin again at the look he gives her. 

"You're hilarious," he says, just the close the loop. "Anyway. You were there after that - by the time I got cleaned up he'd found the wall again, or at least enough pieces of it to play-act. Considering how much we were already imposing on hospitality I wasn't about to start poking around at it." 

Tasha shoots him a thoughtful look. "If it makes you feel any better, he got one up on me out of it, so he did get something," she says, wryly. Clint picks up the ball and chucks it at her. 

"No," he says patiently, "now I feel more guilty about _you_ , Natasha." 

She chucks the ball back and makes a face. "Don't," she says. "One of the great things about that dance is every time I lose, I win. Besides, it's probably good for me." She makes another face. 

"I hope Steve appreciates how hard you're working in exchange for being his friend," Clint says, dry and lightly teasing. And serious. 

Tasha adjusts the temperature under the pot and comes around to this side of the island, leans back on it and folds her arms. "I'm sorry," she says, "who just did the logist - " 

"Yeah, yeah," he says, waving one hand from the wrist and interrupting her, "if you bring strays home . . ." 

Natasha's laugh comes out in a snort, but then she pauses. "Can you actually call Captain America a stray?" she says, frowning thoughtfully, and it's Clint's turn to snort. 

"You mean the guy who used to lurk around the Triskelion training obstacle courses, drifting from one to the other because he had nothing else to do except go home and sleep?" he retorts. "Who lived in a hotel until HR moved him into that place in DC? Who used to linger with sad eyes at the Wall of - " 

"Yeah," Tasha says, shaking her head, "I guess that one fits. He's a lot better, at least." 

"All you need is love," Clint quips, taking another drink of his beer. 

"And a brainwashed super-assassin," Tasha quips back, going back around the counter to stir and then to pull down bowls. Clint gives her a slightly overdone Considering Expression. 

"I've found it hard to go wrong there, I have to admit," he says, and marks his internal scorecard when the mock-glare she gives him has her mouth in a flat line and an eye-roll built in. 

"You know, it's a tragedy you don't date," she says, voice going into the tones you have to call "droll". Clint shakes his head, takes another swallow of beer. 

"Court," he says. "Smooth improvised compliments based on mutual knowledge falls under 'courting', not dating. Or pick-ups," he adds, "because with pick-ups, you don't know the other person. Besides, you actually hate every single ex I have." 

"I don't hate Ksenia," Tasha objects. 

"People I send money to every month don't count as exes," Clint counters, mostly because playing's fun, and he'd actually forgot to include Ksenia in his exes anyway. He usually forgot to put Ksenia in any kind of collective grouping, anyway. She goes in a separate box, on a whole different set of shelves, and mostly stays there. Safer for everyone involved that way. 

"That doesn't even make sense, Barton," Natasha tells him, handing him his bowl of soup. "People the world over are required by legal ruling to pay their exes money. Come sit in the other room," she adds. 

 

Clint falls asleep on the chaise in Tasha's bedroom, more or less covered by a blanket. The blanket is cream-coloured, microfibre, ridiculously soft and actually too warm: around three am he kicks it off and notices there's a text message on his phone, down on the floor beside the chaise. He leans over, stabs the sleep/wake button and reads the first four words of Steve's text, which happen to be _actually that might work._

He awards himself ten points, and then goes back to sleep until Natasha's phone-alarm starts playing Handel's bit for the Queen of Sheba at her sometime after six.


End file.
